Political sharknados you create cannot be others’ red herrings

This is a critique/rebuttal to a recent article from another website. For about a year, a couple of sources have portrayed some members of the Town Board as wholly irredeemable scourges on humanity’s backside, and one side as angelic beings of light. They’ve used political shark tactics (their words describing a relative of the infallible side) to try and make a political sharknado to enrage citizens for one side and against the other, for whatever reasons. In this article, one author defends the other in almost angelic, beatific ways, because that’s just how things are. They don’t have to be logical to you or anyone else, they are dependent on my emotions.

And now the people stirring the sharknado in the town pot are saying that people responding to the sharknado are only using the sharknado as a distraction. The ones stirring the sharknado are now victims of the board. Distraction “from what” is never clarified in this article, and the others, “the well-orchestrated conspiracy” of inept leaders who are not “rock stars” is never explained, so clarification never seems like a goal. It’s enough to repeat that questions exist, and you don’t even have to list the questions. Here, it sounds more like the author means “scapegoat” maybe, but who honestly can know? The contradictions in the articles are comical on many levels, so you can’t help but seem a little sarcastic in responding to them.

To accomplish the smear goal, at various points, the authors contradict their own other stated opinions, and ignore general practices of journalism, civic government, the truth, stability, psychology, human nature, logic, and anything else that gets in the way. They expect things that they shouldn’t expect, and seem surprised that other generally-accepted givens occur. It’s a headlong rush to restate the conclusion and attach new “proof” to the propaganda: those commissioners are “justthisbad believeme look at howbreathlesstheymakeme.” The truth, and the town, suffers in the process.

These stories have been popping up for almost a year, starting with the town property no-sale. The innuendo and suspicions on the rumor mill goes back to before that with the “closed facebook group I am not in are shady” talk. Around that time, this “not a contract, just a plan” started fizzling out, too. That seems to be around the time when the overwrought reactions started in earnest. The town went from “the mouse that roared” to “don’t you see the corruption??????” Some people wrapped their ideas up in the First Amendment and started a blog to promote their “truth.” Others linked arms with them in partnership, while others created and traded facebook group pages like baseball cards or troll dolls. Some people were annoyed at the time, but they seem to have gotten over it. Kudos to them for helping move Hope Mills forward.

Whatever you think about whoever you think about in politics, or in any part of adult life, you have to be able to separate your disappointments out and move on. Adult life is about weighing out ideas and being a responsible person. When it’s so focused on people and your opinions of them, it becomes high schoolish. High school had an end date and everyone graduates and moves on. Towns have elections, and hopefully everyone will grow and move on before November. Or at least find some balance.

Maybe there is redemption and hope in other topics that we just don’t see when politics comes up. Maybe the authors really do help people in other venues. Revenge against other people in any subject field never helps anyone. It’s never as satisfying as you think it will be, no matter how hard you try to pretend it’s something else. Most of the time, all you can do is scan through these stories and try to make sense of them, but after a while you just have to recognize the whole series for what they are, and that ranges from bitter venting to comedy gold, sometimes in the same sentence.